Serving the Truth

Another year nearly complete, this week we honor the 10 Best Books of 2015, as selected by our editors. But not all of this year’s winners can be considered exactly new. One of the chosen books was originally published in 1987. “The Door,” by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo, who died in 2007 at 90, is about the relationship between a character who resembles the author and her cantankerous elderly housekeeper, Emerence.

The Book Review noticed Szabo as early as 1963, when Gerald Sykes reviewed her novel “The Fawn.” But Szabo, famous in her native country, did not find a sizable audience in the United States during her life. Len Rix’s translation of “The Door” appeared in Britain in 2005, and was published here only this year.

In the Book Review last February, Claire Messud wrote about “The Door”: “It’s astonishing that this masterpiece should have been essentially unknown to English-language readers for so long. . . . Szabo’s lines and images come to my mind unexpectedly, and with them powerful emotions. It has altered the way I understand my own life.”

Though Szabo’s work dealt with life behind the Iron Curtain, she considered art a sphere apart from politics. “A writer must never be involved in politics in the same way as a politician,” she said in a 2007 interview. “These are two totally separate things. Writers have a different job to do. It is up to them to make people scared if they have taken the wrong path. A writer doesn’t necessarily need to die for the sake of truth, but they must serve it at all costs. This is what all honorable writers do.”

Quotable

“I hope there is still a role for people who spent their lives in the library looking at three lines of Aeschylus, or Homer, or whatever. . . . Not every academic has to be like me.” — Mary Beard, in an interview with Salon

Barth and Gass, Reunited

This week, Stephen Burn reviews collections by John Barth and William H. Gass, two writers once at the vanguard of American fiction. It’s not the first time this newspaper has paired the two. In 1968, Eliot Fremont-Smith, a book critic for The Times, considered Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” and Gass’s “Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife” in a single review that wrestled with the idea of artistic experimentation and Ezra Pound’s famous commandment to “make it new!”

Fremont-Smith called both books “funny . . . experimental amusements, self-absorbed, arbitrarily involuted, belligerently specialized, tedious, delightful, much work to comprehend.” He continued: “They are not, I venture to guess, books that will be widely read. But that is not the point. They are authors’ exercises and, if no more than that, by virtue of the authority and daring they exhibit, these books yet tone up the whole of imaginative literary art.”